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Game Development Based on Source-Code/1.4.3
Single Genre combinations Multi-Genre combinations The only way to get a "Great Combo" for multi-genre games is to use two genres that when used on their own with the chosen topic result in a "Great Combo". This means that topics like Surgery can not get "Great Combo" on multi-genre games. -source Platform/Genre combinations Each genre has its own popularity on each platform. Your choice of genre, relative to platform, slightly affects the review scores. The higher the sales modifier of the selected platform, the more sales you will get with that genre. Platform/Target audience combinations You will occasionally get messages about matches or mismatches of target audience and platform you have chosen. Your choice of audience primarily affects the number of sales your game will generate. The higher the sales modifier of the selected platform is, the more sales you will get with that target audience. -source Development phase Design sliders allow the player to control the time allocation for the various aspects of the project. The higher a slider is set to with respect to others, the more allocated time it will receive during development, which can be previewed at the bottom bar of the game development screen. Important: Development has a large influence on your review score. Slider Allocation Allocating sliders has two main consequences: #Allocating certain thresholds of allotted time to certain fields can increase or decrease game quality. For each genre (or genre combination) each field can be important or unimportant. There are several rules that add or substract to game quality modifier based on how you assign time to important or unimportant fields, if you are aiming for maximum quality they can be summed like this : #*At least twice assign over 40% time to an important field #*Never assign less than 20% time to an important field #*Never assign over 40% time to an unimportant field #Amount of Design and Technology bubbles generated by your employees is proportional to the inheritant Design/Technology ratio of the field, and amount of time allocated to that field dedicates what portion of total development time will be spent on developing the field. Here is the table with Design/Technology ratios: This means that, for example, if you assign 50% development time of Stage 2 to Dialogues, 30% to Level Design and 20% to AI, then during 50% of the time spent on the phase, 90% of bubbles generated by your employees will be design bubbles and 10% tech bubbles, then during 30% of the time spent, 40% of the bubbles will be design and 60% will be tech, and during last 20% of the time spent, 20% of the bubbles will be design and 80% will be tech. Game quality and correct Tech/Design balance (exact value you must aim for is based on the chosen genre) is very important during rating calculation. Single Genre focus When reading the tables below, remember, it is the bottom composite bar consisting of three parts (located under the sliders) that is important, not how much percentage you assign to each slider individually. All those 40%'s and 20%'s refer to the relative size of the field's part on the bottom bar. Multi-Genre focus For multi-genre combinations, the values are weighted with the first chosen genre being twice as important as the second one. Refer to the Review Algorithm for more information on how the following values were calculated. The point of multi-genres is to eliminate a genre's requirements, giving you more flexibility with what features to cram in. For example, Strategy/Adventure and Strategy/RPG has only 3 "+" fields and everything else is not bound by rules, while if you'd be making Strategy or RPG, you'd have 6 "+" fields and 1 "-" field to worry about, therefore, multi-genre gives you more creative freedom when you combine genres properly. The downside to using a multi-genre with less than 2 desired fields in a stage is that your game quality will not be increased as much as a multi-genre combination that does have 2 desired fields. -source Employee allocation Starting with medium sized games and up, you can assign certain employees to certain fields. You must assign an employee to each of the nine fields, and only one can be assigned to each field. Based on the size of the game, employee will get "used up" in the project at different rate. For medium projects, the rate is 1, for large it is 5/3 and for AAA it is 2. This means that for each percent of time allocated to a certain field, employee assigned to it will receive that many usage percent. Therefore, medium game will require a total of 3 people to complete, large will require 5 and AAA will require 6, without overloading your employees. The total amount of employee's effort used is displayed as a progress bar under employee's name on the slider allocation screen. If you do not let any employee get a serious overload, you will be awarded with a 30% experience bonus for Good Management (this does not affect review scores). Overloading an employee results in less points towards Design and Technology. No matter who is assigned to what field, every employee keeps contributing design and tech points to the project. However, it seems that depending on who you assign, overall points contributed are slightly varied. Assigning a person that fits better to the field will make you end up with more design/tech points overall. You can refer to the table in the beginning of the article to find out who is best fit for what field. Case study: Late in the game (year 40) while developing a medium game assigning employees correctly (every employee has enough design and tech points to fully cover the requirements of the field) gave net result of 2536 total points (average between 2 tries), and assigning employees incorrectly (every employee has not enough points to cover at least one requirement - for example, a 300/800 employee assigned to a 810/90 field) gave net result of 2404 total points (average between 2 tries). This is only a 5% increase but maybe if the difference in stats was more drastic (like, assigning a 720/180 employee to a 180/720 field) there would be a bigger difference in net result. Since you only compete against your own high score, having a balanced all-around team (every member with very close design and tech stats) would be much more viable because it would be easier to make consistent games. A downside would be that you would have to wait a little bit longer before you can open your R&D lab. Development phase for dummies If you are absolutely clueless about what to do after reading the previous paragraph, do not want to learn how the game works, but rather want a simple solution, just set the sliders themselves to the percentage values provided in the table below: Read this before using the table below! Sliders are not the main way of getting good scores, it is a mix between many factors. Some of them include previous reviews, your staff, what year it is, the genre to the platform and the main one is your tech/design ratio. I'm not saying this table is worthless (it kinda is), but if you follow this table and your tech/design score is way off, then you will get horrible reviews every now and then, because your game quality will be unstable - sometimes you will hit the nail on the head with this table, sometimes you'll be far from top quality, and unstability is what leads to bad reviews. Please check out some other pages and read up on the game before using this table or just have fun and make games how you would want to play them. The table way above with + and - is a much better reference if you know what you are doing. Say you are Tech 300, Design 300, Speed 300, and Research 300 Your 2nd employee is Tech 500, Design 100, Speed 150, and Research 200 3rd Employee is Tech 400, Design 200, Speed 200, and Research 100 Your tech/design ratio will be off. Your tech would be way too high for most genres. Rpg, Adventure...etc would be getting bad quality (due to you getting wrong tech/design balance), while Simulation, Strategy would be getting good quality (due to getting correct balance). If your staff would have an excess of design over tech, it would be vice versa. Therefore, if you'd to follow the table below, you would have good quality games of some genre, but bad quality of other, meaning you would keep getting very bad reviews every now and then for your inconsistency in game score. While this will work for you at the beginning of the game, when you have one employee and few features, later in the game, when you have multiple employees and multiple features, this table will no longer provide you with the highest possible game quality but more of a rough guide. Specialization Training To specialize in a specific slider you will need to be level 7 and meet required levels of design and technology. This can also serve as a guide for which employees to use for each slider. Great games need employees focused on either design or technology, as well as employees with a good balance of both. Save your well balanced employees for phase #3. Specialization costs 200 research point and 5M credits per person. More visually explicit version : Additional Versions Downloadable PDF version: PDF Version 1.2 Game Dev Tycoon - Game Development Chart - Template: Spreadsheet - Spreadsheet version, includes a Combination Grid for tracking combinations across all Topics and Genres.